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Discussions, news and rants from the CTO of Developer Express, Julian M Bucknall

Show us more skin, baby

     

It seems our principal graphics designer had some spare time on his hands recently (we're obviously not working him hard enough -- soon change that, laughing evilly), and decided to create two new skins, green and pink, for the Office 2007 look-and-feel fans out there. Here's the pink one:



You can download them from our Downloads page (go to the bottom of the page to find the download link and also an image of both skins).

To use the new skins, you must first add a reference to the downloaded assembly to your project. At this point they're available to you at design-time.



To make them available at run-time, you need to add one line to your code to register the assembly:


C#:
DevExpress.Skins.SkinManager.Default.RegisterAssembly(typeof(DevExpress.UserSkins.Office2007Bonus).Assembly);

VB:
DevExpress.Skins.SkinManager.Default.RegisterAssembly(GetType(DevExpress.UserSkins.Office2007Bonus).Assembly)

Probably the best place for this is in the method that initializes the components on the main form.

Enjoy!

Published Jul 25 2007, 02:34 PM by Julian Bucknall (DevExpress)
Filed under: , ,
Technorati tags: Skins, WinForms, Office 2007
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Comments

 

Nate said:

hehe nice! are these going to be included in a future install so we don't have to keep digging out the zip file and replacing the dll?

July 25, 2007 6:13 PM
 

Mehul Harry (DevExpress) said:

The Look-And-Feel just keeps getting better for our WinForms controls.

July 25, 2007 6:54 PM
 

Christophe Kamieniarz said:

How about the dark black (as shown at www.codeproject.com/.../presentation.png), seen essentially in WPF applications?

July 25, 2007 10:32 PM
 

Unique Display Name said:

Will these skins be supported in future versions of the suite?

I'd hate to give them to my users and have to take them away again at some point in the future.

July 26, 2007 1:24 AM
 

Stefan Renzewitz said:

Good point Darren, this is indeed very important for me too. Beside that the new skins are much appreciated! I wish you would give your graphic designer even more spare time!

July 26, 2007 1:41 AM
 

Alex Danvy [DX-Squad] said:

omg, they did it : Barbie theme is finally here... :-P

Where's the Hulk theme screenshoot ?

July 26, 2007 4:24 AM
 

Nate Laff said:

Those are cool. Well, maybe not so much the pink one. That's pretty atrocious :P

But yeah, are these eventually going to be included in the install? Is support going to be dropped at some point? Like everyone else I'm hesitent to put them into the wild and then have support taken away.

I'd like to see them included personally. You already include the BonusSkins dll why not an Office2007BonusSkins dll as well :)

July 26, 2007 10:09 AM
 

Kashif waheed said:

This looks good but it would be more wise if we provide consistent hover effect to the all components showing list data.

for example, grid component, it should display light orange 3d background when hovering the mouse over the row and dark orange when selecting the row.

I have already created a suggestion and would like to encourage you guys to vote for it (Suggestion ID: CS59976). I have attached the sample picture for what I am talking about.

Anyway, thanks for giving more visual look & feels.

Looking towards to all you guys support for the same.

July 26, 2007 10:56 AM
 

Julian Bucknall (DevExpress) said:

Couple of answers to questions posed by commenters:

- it's likely that these two new skins will just become part of the product. We're very aware though that our download is mighty large already, and don't want to overload it.

- although I was jesting a little about Mike, our principal graphics designer, doing these in his spare time, these are official DX skins. They're not going to go away, and will be maintained and tweaked in the future.

- The downloads page (I've just added it as a link in the article) has a link to an image of the "Incredible Hulk" green skin.

- I kind of like the pink skin...

Cheers, Julian

July 26, 2007 1:03 PM
 

Brendon Muck [DX Squad] said:

Oh man, the ladies in the accounting office are going to love the pink skin.

July 26, 2007 5:49 PM
 

JDog said:

We haven't made the switch to devexpress purely for the fact that our software allows the end users to colorize the application based on department.  We use another third part component and would like to dive into the devexpress products but the "skin" limitation prohibits us.  It would be nice to see a skin collection with basic color pallete?  "Blue, Green, Red, Yellow, etc."

July 29, 2007 1:22 PM
 

RussCA said:

There seems to be a much broader issue that is being ignored here.  Approximately 30% of the population at large have some form of visual impairment.  These range from color blindness to glaucoma and various degrees of corneal scarring and cataracts.  For those of us (myself included) who have such a disability, the ever p;resent bright white screen is a major difficulty.  Microsoft recognized this some time ago, and included various "accessibility" options in Windows XP.  I don't know if Vista has any of these, but if not, shame on Microsoft.  In fact, shame of Microsoft for setting up products such as Office 2007 to be so restrictive in its color themes.  Does anyone know if Microsoft is planning to correct their oversight?  

January 19, 2008 12:44 PM
 

StringSoft Inc. said:

I'm getting a conflict using the Office 2007 Bonus Skins dll.  The download is version 7.3.6 and after installing DXperience 7.3.7 it is giving me version conflict with version 7.3.7 of DevExpress.Utils.

Are you going to do a rebuild on this dll (as we will have to remove the skins from our application until it is)  Don't get me wrong, not complaining (much)  I really like the new skins.... any chance of getting St. Patricks Day done before St. Patrick's Day?

February 5, 2008 5:57 PM

About Julian Bucknall (DevExpress)

Julian is the Chief Technology Officer at Developer Express. You can reach him directly at julianb@devexpress.com. You can also follow him on Twitter with the ID JMBucknall.
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